The Palestinians dream on

At the end of August, uncertainty still reigned over the progress of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Binyamin Netanyahu made a stream of contradictory declarations while forging ahead with settlements. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat desperately needs an agreement to boost his authority, in the hope of consolidating the state structure that the Palestinian leadership has built up over 30 years through the PLO, in response to the Palestinians’ strong desire for a unifying framework within which to express their aspirations. But can this strategy lead to a viable state

by Alain Gresh

Union meetings, women’s conferences, portraits of Yasser Arafat
plastered up on tatty walls: Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps had
not seen such activity for ages. In Beirut itself, the Palestine
Liberation Organisation’s refugee office resumed handing out support
payments to the most impoverished. Did last spring’s visit to Lebanon
by Assad Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian Authority’s top official for
refugees, followed by the influx of PLO funds, mean that Mr Arafat’s
strategy had taken a new turn (1)?

Since the signing of the Oslo accords on 13 September 1993,
exactly five years ago, the PLO had practically stopped doing
anything about the millions of refugees. Its structure has merged
with that of the Authority put in place in Gaza under Mr Arafat’s
chairmanship. All that remains in Tunis is the PLO’s “political
department” and Farouk Kaddoumi, in charge of the Palestinians’
foreign missions (2).

Since his return to Gaza in 1994, Mr Arafat has tried, with some
success, to establish his power base in a society which he did not
know well. But his authority does not extend beyond a few
overpopulated bantustans, isolated one from the other and subject to
permanent control by Israel’s armed forces. Frustrated by this
deadlock, the ageing leader is threatening unilaterally to proclaim
the creation of a Palestinian state when the interim period of
autonomy ends next May.

But he knows his hand is weak, faced with an intransigent Israeli
government, a spineless American administration and an international
community that has abdicated its responsibilities. By staging a
“return” to Lebanon, is Mr Arafat trying to broaden his base of
operations so as to remind the United States, as well as Israel, that
the Palestinians are a political factor in the whole Middle East
equation, not just in Gaza?

Very likely. But beyond these tactics lies the question of the
very future of Palestinian nationalism. The question is admirably
addressed by Yezid Sayigh in his detailed and subtle analysis of
Palestinian nationalism and the question of armed struggle (3).
Sayigh is Assistant Director of Studies at the Centre of
International Studies at Cambridge University and was an advisor to
the Palestinian delegation during the Madrid negotiations
(1991-93).

The point of departure is the catastrophe of 1948, with the
expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (4) and their
dispersal into refugee camps. In the 1950s, with their elites
discredited, all that remained was a patriotism based on attachment
to land or village. This feeling was transformed into
proto-nationalism by the experience of social and political
marginalisation: nowhere in the Arab world were the Palestinians
welcome and nowhere did they have the same rights as the indigenous
population, even in countries like Jordan that gave them
citizenship.

Mass education - made possible by UNRWA - and “the transformation
of a people of small farmers, artisans and traders... into a people
of clerks, accountants and administrators” helped foster this
affirmation of identity. But “the rise of a distinctly Palestinian
nationalism... was not inevitable, given the absence of the common
political and institutional framework of the state.” The search for
some such common framework - Sayigh’s central thesis - was a crucial
element in the rebuilding of the Palestinian political movement.

Absence of a revolutionary logic

Such a framework would eventually emerge from an almost chance
circumstance, the new Arab defeat of June 1967, which created a
political, ideological and military vacuum that lasted for months
(with Nasserism and pan-Arab ideologies discredited, the Jordanian
regime shaken, etc.), engulfing the armed Palestinian movements -
Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) of George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh (5). These
organisations moved to Jordan, took control of the refugee camps,
established an independent military presence and espoused a rhetoric
of “total liberation of Palestine” and revolution that echoed from
Algiers to Baghdad.

The fedayin’s strategy looked the same as throughout the third
world at that time, from Vietnam to southern Africa or Latin America:
gun-toting national and social revolution. But, in fact, neither
Fatah nor the PFLP were fired by any spirit of “revolution” and armed
struggle had never even been considered. There was no Palestinian
strategic thinking, no theoretical military scenario. At no time did
the fedayin represent any sort of military threat to Israel.

As Sayigh explains, armed struggle was above all “the source of
political legitimacy and national identity... The heroic imagery and
language of armed struggle gave new substance to the imagined
community of the Palestinians”, creating a national dynamic which
helped them achieve political independence, in particular between
1967 and 1982, first in Jordan and then in Lebanon.

What the Palestinian resistance was trying to do above all was to
create a state framework, missing so far, in which nationalism could
really develop. It would find it in the Palestine Liberation
Organisation, founded by the Arab League in 1964 and until then much
criticised by the fedayin. Naji Alloush, one of the leaders of
Fatah’s left wing, rightly criticised the leadership for abandoning
the revolution and trying to transform the PLO into a “state in
exile”.

“The generation that took control of the PLO in 1968-69”, writes
Sayigh, “... was strikingly similar in terms of its social origins to
the ’new elites’ that came to power in Egypt, Syria, Algeria and Iraq
between 1952 and 1968”. Fatah, the strongest of the fedayin groups,
put its cadres in a number of leading positions and integrated some
of its own organisations (the Martyrs’ Foundation, the Red Crescent)
into the PLO. At the same time, it enlarged its structure to create
jobs for its own rank and file (a form of clientelism), as well as
for members of the other organisations. In this way, it could be sure
of the loyalty of tens of thousands of employees.

This was “hardly unusual” for young independent states, but what
was original in the Palestinian case “was that it evolved within the
framework of a national liberation movement” which did not control a
single part of its territory. The influx of financial aid from the
Gulf states and other Arab countries, proper political “earnings”,
was also a key element in building this quasi-state and enabling it
to run on clientelistic lines.

In fact, despite a pluralism of sorts, the PLO had the same faults
as all the neighbouring Arab states on which it had based itself:
lack of accountability on the part of its leaders, absence of
self-criticism, patrimonialism, personal power and the transformation
of political activists into civil servants. It was nervous of any
signs of individual independence and maintained a stubborn distrust
of any movements in the West Bank and Gaza it did not completely
control. All the Palestinian organisations, including those on the
left, accepted this statist and clientelistic order of things,
negotiating with Mr Arafat the distribution of posts and funds.

But the PLO was not a state, and could not therefore really act
like one, except during short periods - notably the 1970s in Lebanon.
On a daily basis, the Palestinians were mainly dependent on the
actual states they lived in. And each time the PLO’s statist system
failed to work efficiently - in particular, in materially helping the
Palestinians with their daily needs - and forced them to tie their
survival strategy to rival state centres (Amman, Damascus),
Palestinian nationalism grew weaker.

The expulsion of the PLO from Beirut in summer 1982 marked the
start of a long crisis, which grew more severe after the Gulf war and
the leadership’s disastrous stand in support of Iraq. Isolated in
Tunis, far from all the countries where the Palestinians lived, and
in dire financial straits, the PLO could neither pay its employees
nor help the refugees. Its very existence was at stake when the
Israeli-Arab negotiations opened in Madrid on 30 October 1991 - in
its absence. Only the Palestinians “from inside” were there. Yasser
Arafat told his colleagues that the United States wanted “to
humiliate [him] and eliminate [him]”. And eliminating
him meant “eliminating the PLO and all of you”.

The secret talks leading to Oslo offered him a way out of this
desperate corner. Admittedly, he endorsed a declaration of principles
which was a retreat from the autonomy plans put on the table with the
1978 Camp David Accords. But, as Sayigh points out, for Mr Arafat the
main thing was that “it extended formal Israeli recognition of the
PLO and ensured the transfer of the state-in-exile to the occupied
territories. It was the PLO’s political survival, rather than any
specific provision in the accord, that provided the real guarantee of
eventual statehood (6).” The Oslo accords mark a turning point, the
passage “from a national movement in exile to a governmental
apparatus on its own soil”. The centre of national politics, the
social base and the state institutions were now united in Gaza and
the West Bank.

However, the five years that followed were a disaster. The
Authority was confined to a ghetto, without the territorial
continuity in which to build a state. At the same time, intentionally
or unintentionally, the PLO lost contact with the refugees:
renouncing armed struggle had lost it a unifying slogan. And the
future seemed all the more uncertain resting on the shoulders of one
man - and a sick one at that.

“Arafat”, comments Sayigh, “was not unlike many Arab leaders in
wishing to lead the masses without the impediments of intermediate
bodies such as political parties or highly structured mass
organisations”. That absence of a political movement in the true
sense of the word left the field wide open for the Islamists. Mr
Arafat identifies completely with the successes of the PLO - national
renaissance, international diplomatic recognition, etc. - as he does
with all its terrible mistakes, in particular during the Gulf war.
The Palestinian people have paid a heavy price for this
personalisation of power. And they risk paying an even heavier one
for their leader’s failure to build independent institutions that are
not answerable to him alone. The question now is whether the PLO will
survive Yasser Arafat (7).